More on paywalls

I don’t think there’s much of a future for paywalls (where punters are charged to access online journlism). There’s an article on the BBC here, which seems to suggest the future is charging for content. I think it may work for a while, but then you’ll start to lose traffic that you never regain.

The most important thing is reach. You want to have as many readers as possible. Everything else is secondary.

I read your site, but I skip everything that isn’t about wine, a subject I am interested in and you know much more about than me.
When you write about other subjects in which I have no interest – football, children, dogs – I skip.
I would pay to read your site, providing it was only about wine. I do pay to read Jancis Robinson’s purple pages, because it is written by people who know more than me, and most of the forum contributions (unlike eParker) are by people who know more than me, and who are aware that most tasting notes are a waste of time (www.clive-coates.com/observations/tasting-notes).
So I’ll pay for information (“news you can use”) and opinions from competent professionals about subjects that interest me, and for the pleasure of having no adverts.
The Times and the Sunday Times have, over the last 20 years,steadily abandoned this category of material (we used to call it “journalism”), so I doubt the new site will flourish behind a pay wall.
Reach may make you famous. It doesn’t pay the bills. Tom Cruise is famous. Acting pays his bills.

On the other hand, there aren’t that many people today who actually do earn a living from wine writing. Even today, for many it represents a little bit of additional income or is just plain fun.

I think you may be dismissing too easily the possibility that people actually might be willing to pay for quality contents (as Philip suggests). One of the advantages with ‘online’ is that it costs little to produce (apart from actually writing the material). This means that you don’t have to have huge numbers of paying readers to make it interesting. Every single one of the paying readers is actually positive margin. Not so with printed media.

It will be interesting to see what happens in the future.

To some extent it poses the question, does quality pay or does quantity pay (indirectly through eyeballs)?

People are motivated by personal achievement and recognition by their peers, not money. I used to visit Jancis’ site daily when the site was more accessible now I’d even forgotten her site exited until Philip mentioned it.

I am far more interested to hear what a knowledgeable person thinks on a subject, if they are not commercially driven to express their opinion.

There will always be free content on the Internet. Long lived the Internet!
It will eventually make money obsolete.